Best Non-Fiction Books 2025: Top 10 Reads

When is a human being a human being? The fact that this question arose in the 19th century in the face of a new killing machine – the guillotine – sounds both surprising and obvious. What the Hungarian essayist László F. Földényi brings to light based on this question in his book “The Long Shadow of the Guillotine” is captivating.

Földényi reads the guillotine “as a prelude and symbol for the fragmentary nature of modernity,” describes Tania Martini: “He delivers a vibrant story of the 19th century in which the dividing power of the guillotine resonates in all areas of society. The ‘ideal of a whole’ is being cleared away everywhere. From the cut off heads and the question that concerns everyone about what a cut off head even perceives, what makes a person a human being and when exactly no longer, it was not far to the question of the relationship between spirit and matter, between the physical and moral world. Between the murder machine, the steam engine and the sewing machine, man’s metaphysical abandonment became a certainty.

László F. Földenyi: “Der lange Schatten der Guillotine”. Translated from Hungarian by Akos Doma. Matthes & Seitz, 302 pages, hardcover, €28.

Texas-based historian Fritz Bartel shows that global financial markets, not people or ideas, brought about the end of the Cold War.

Our reviewer Oliver Weber emphasizes: “It is not people and ideas that dominate the stage, but rather the money flows of the global financial markets.” The democratic takeover in Poland, the book’s punchline goes, “was a side effect of an IMF debt restructuring program. The socialist leadership was looking for democratic legitimacy in order to implement its austerity program. Communism no longer made any sense in such an era of social cuts.”

Fritz Bartel: “Broken Promises”. The End of the Cold War and the Rise of Neoliberalism. Translated from English by F. Kurz and U. Mogultay. Verlag Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 2025. 440 pages, illustrations, hardcover, €40.

Nobody would have thought that a new Bible translation in 1926 would have the potential to trigger one of the most important German-Jewish debates. “The Bible Translation of Buber-Rosenzweig” documents the history of a project about which intellectuals such as Walter Benjamin, Gerschom Scholem, Ernst Bloch, Margarete Susman and Siegfried Kracauer heatedly argued. Nothing less than the central themes of modernity were discussed.

Wolfgang Matz states that the documentation reads as “an overly sharp, breathtaking snapshot of a mixture of catastrophic consciousness, of inner and outer world, political and religious hopes for revolution or redemption and utopias.” The anthology traces the “controversy about the actualizability of religious content, which is by no means antiquated to this day” – “even in those political utopias of the 20th century that see themselves as atheistic but carry the entire burden of religious mysticism of salvation with them.”

Former constitutional judge Susanne Baer describes the inner workings of the Federal Constitutional Court in loving detail and dispels common myths.

Our reviewer Klaus Ferdinand Gärditz writes: “With eight judges per senate, the Federal Constitutional Court is primarily a collegiate court. Its judges are people, and the interpretation of the constitution prompted by case-related applications is not magic, but a highly professional craft.” The book is “unique in its depth of color and richness of detail” and is “valuable for both a broad and a specialist audience”. Anyone who wants to understand how the internal mechanisms work in Germany’s highest court will get their money’s worth here.

Susanne Baer: “Red Lines”. How the Federal Constitutional Court protects democracy. Herder Verlag, Freiburg 2025. 384 pages, br., €22.

The year 1936 is a crucial turning point in the history of the Middle East. The Arab rebellion against the Jewish settlers and the British mandate, in which the Palestinians came together as a people, lasted around three years and has served as a resistance narrative ever since. Oren Kessler achieves the feat of portraying the drama in the Middle East almost without ideology.

Reviewer Wolfgang Matz is moved by the hopelessness that emerges from Kessler’s knowledge: “Is this the root of the conflict? Immigration quotas, majority relationships, territorial divisions, political, administrative, military dominance – it is infinitely depressing to read how the ruthless representatives of their own cause repeatedly prevail among the protagonists; how terror on the streets turns everyday life into a battleground; how pacifist settlers become weapon carriers; how all of them Peace ideas that are still being discussed today – independence, two-state solution – fail because of the inability to compromise, maximum demands, hatred, violence.

The archaeologist Gabrielzuchtriegel interprets Pompeii’s final years as a spiritual earthquake and shows how recent excavations shed light on the replacement of pagan cults by Christianity.

According to Tilman Spreckelsen, the picture thatzuchtriegel paints is based on the social conditions in a city that has clearly alienated itself from its agricultural roots and is characterized by strong social differences. While the “places of worship were previously found in nature, on certain bodies of water, mountains or forests, since around the middle of the first millennium BC, more and more temples were built for them in the city, while in return the wilderness was reclaimed.” Breeding bars, according to our reviewer, state a “spiritual tremor” that “first reached the lower class.”

Gabrielzuchtriegel: “Pompeii’s Last Summer”. When the gods left the world. Propyläen Verlag, Berlin 2025. 320 pages, hardcover, €33.

The sociologist Nils Kumkar explains the supposed division in society as a communicative phenomenon.

Our reviewer Hannah Schmidt-Ott emphasizes: “Unlike Steffen Mau and his colleagues, Kumkar does not view polarization as an expression of opposing beliefs. For him, polarization is a communicative phenomenon.” According to him, polarization works “like a magnetic field, an invisible attraction” to which communication is based. “This perspective,” says Schmidt-Ott, “also involves a reassessment: polarization is not necessarily a danger to democracy, but, on the contrary, central to its functioning.”

Nils C. Kumkar: “Polarization”. About the order of politics. Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2025. 290 pages, br., €18.

The historian Sven Beckert tells the thousand-year history of global capitalism as a story of coercion, monopoly formation and the intertwining of state power and commercial interests.

Lutz Raphael emphasizes: “Robbery, slavery or forced labor and monopolies, according to Beckert, are methods still used today to acquire and increase capital. Accordingly, great importance is given in the book to ‘war capitalism’, which was the dominant way in which the capitalist world revolution took place between 1450 and 1850.” Our reviewer states largely in agreement: “Beckert’s book tells a global development story that knows only one law, namely that of the unstoppable compulsion to increase capital.”

Sven Beckert: “Capitalism”. History of a world revolution. Translated from English by Helmut Dierlamm, Werner Roller, Sigrid Schmid and Thomas Stauder. Rowohlt Verlag, Hamburg 2025. 1280 pages, illustrations, hardcover, €42.

After her global success “Free,” the Albanian political scientist Lea Ypi presented “Upright,” a fictionalized memoir about her grandmother’s eventful life between the Ottoman Empire, fascism and communism. Ypi has once again succeeded in confidently interweaving the great historical lines with the intimacy of personal fates and developing an entertaining story from them.

Marianna Lieder’s review states: “There is no question that this was an unusually eventful life, an exemplary ‘survival in the age of extremes’ that is worth telling, as the subtitle says: Leman Ypi, née Leskowiku, was born in 1918 as the daughter of an Albanian provincial governor in the Ottoman Empire. She grew up in Thessaloniki, which was then still called Saloniki, she visited a French high school and otherwise spent her first years of life like a girl from the highest circles spent her life in a world that has long since disappeared. For Ypi, it is clear from her family history that there is nothing to gloss over about real-world socialism. Nevertheless, according to Marianna Lieder, Ypi is clear that real freedom is not possible under capitalism. To do this, she “combined Marx with Kant and christened her vision for the best of all possible worlds with the name ‘moral socialism’”.

Lea Ypi: “Upright”. Survival in the age of extremes. Translated from English by Eva Bonné, Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2025. 389 pages, illustrations, hardcover, €28.

In his essay “Meteor,” Joseph Vogl searches for the floating, ephemeral, fleeting and fluid. In literature, philosophy and the natural sciences, he finds processes that have established themselves in the “no longer and not yet” and questions them with regard to the possibilities they open up.

Reviewer Jospeh Hanimann writes: “The floating or ‘meteoric’, something lifted into the air, is something that neither weighs down nor flies away. It lies in the unsteady balance between opposing forces and is elusive, like clouds and fog. Vogl’s concern is to consider this unstable quality in the wide spectrum of linguistic, epistemological, scientific-historical or political implications. More associative than With side glances at the atomistic declension theory of the ‘clinamen’ in Lucretius, at the cloud theory of Luke Howard and Goethe or at various literary motifs, the author systematically seeks to show a relationship to the world that could contribute to a better understanding of our cognitively, politically and existentially evaporating contemporary experience.

Joseph Vogl: “Meteor”. Experiment on the floating. CH Beck Verlag, Munich, 2025. 144 pages, illustrations, hardcover, €20.